If you’ve driven machinery from various eras, you probably know firsthand how the outward visibility of new cars pales in comparison to that of old cars. We understand this from experience, but it’s been a hard thing to put numbers on until now. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has quantified outward visibility in both new and old cars, and the results aren’t good. Based on this sample, it’s harder to see out of new cars than ever before, and that may play a significant role in making our roads more dangerous.
Pedestrian deaths in America hit an all-time low in 2009 with 4,109 fatalities, but that trend quickly reversed. By 2022, more American pedestrians were dying in collisions than at any point in recorded history, and while 2023 saw a slight decline from 7,522 pedestrian deaths to 7,318 pedestrian deaths, that number is still incredibly high. While mobile phone use has increased since 2009, surely that isn’t the only reason for this worsening trend, right?
Pretty much all new cars produced in the past seven years offer automatic emergency braking, and since we live in a global car market, we also benefit from European crash testing that has included pedestrian tests since 1997. Since many cars sold in North America are structurally identical to their European-market counterparts, maybe there’s more to the alarmingly high number of pedestrian fatalities than just the crossover craze and mobile phone use. That’s why the IIHS turned to technology to actually quantify outward visibility.
The new IIHS method relies on computational software and a portable camera rig that can be positioned in the driver seat at various heights to represent different-sized drivers, no matter where the vehicle is located. The camera rotates to take a 360-degree image of the field of vision around the vehicle. The software then converts that image into a blind zone map that depicts an aerial view of the vehicle and the nearest points on the ground that the driver can see. It also provides a numerical value for the percentage of the area around the vehicle that is visible.
Neat, right? For this test, IIHS researchers honed in on the metric of 180-degree forward visibility within a 10 meter (32.8-foot) radius of the vehicle, rounded up old and new examples of six popular cars – the Chevrolet Suburban, Ford F-150, Honda Accord, Honda CR-V, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and Toyota Camry – and put its rig in the driver’s seat. You can probably guess what the non-profit found.
Let’s start with the worst of the worst. If you’ve driven a first-generation (1995 – 2000) Honda CR-V, you know just how expansive the view out is. According to this IIHS test, first-gen CR-V drivers can see 68 percent of everything 10 meters ahead. Once the rig was put into a 2023 CR-V, however, a stark contrast appeared. Shockingly, drivers of the new model are only able to see 28 percent of the area out to 10 meters ahead of them.
The 2000 Chevrolet Suburban is in a similar place, even if it started out worse. Drivers of the old example were able to see 56 percent of the area 10 meters in front of them, but with the 2023 model, that figure plummets to a shocking 28 percent. Since the Suburban is essentially a half-ton pickup truck with a wagon body, you’d expect to see a similarly precipitous decline for the Ford F-150.
Drivers of the jellybean 1997 F-150 could only see 43 percent of the forward space within a 10-meter radius, notably worse than the 2000 Suburban, and things only get more interesting from there. Since the 2015 F-150 and the current model use the same cab, the IIHS used a 2015 model and found that it let drivers see 36 percent of forward area within 10 meters of the vehicle. Still not a good number by any means, but a huge improvement over the new Suburban.
Unsurprisingly, sedans fared better than SUVs and trucks, though things aren’t trending in the right direction. Visibility from within the 2023 Honda Accord came in at 60 percent, versus 65 percent for the 2003 model year. Drivers of the 2023 Camry can see 57 percent of the forward area within 10 meters of the vehicle, compared to 61 percent in the 2007 model.
So what have we learned, other than a 2000 Chevrolet Suburban has nearly as good forward visibility as a brand new Toyota Camry? Well, new cars are harder to see out of than ever before, and once you combine the increased crossover utility vehicle sales mix with the serious decline in visibility for crossovers and SUVs over the past 25 years or so, a serious potential problem emerges. Obviously, a larger sample size is needed, but as IIHS senior research engineer Becky Mueller said, “If further research confirms that these changes reflect a general change, that would suggest that declining visibility in SUVs has compounded the effects of taller, blunt-nosed vehicles that IIHS has already documented.”
More interestingly, it’s not necessarily thick modern A-pillars that decrease forward visibility, but other components such as hood height and angle, cowl height, and mirror size. IIHS researchers attribute the bulk of the new CR-V and Suburban’s reduced visibility to those elements, meaning a happy medium between strong pillars and good visibility theoretically exists. There’s even a good chance it’s on the market already, as IIHS researchers are working through the process of comparing visibility maps of 150 new vehicles.
Top graphic image: IIHS
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As thrilled as I am for this problem to be getting some much-needed attention, I feel like there’s some book cooking going on with this methodology to be getting down to 28 percent.
It’s measuring visible area immediately around the car. Imagine if the window sill is in the same place relative to your head in both a crossover and a sedan. Since you’re up higher in a crossover, it will be harder to see the area directly around you. Like trying to see directly below you out the window of a 2 story building versus a 1 story building.
I don’t know why they would sandbag the test like that when the problem is easily demonstrated by concealing an entire family of pedestrians in a crosswalk behind the driver side A pillar.
In other news: Water is wet
Cowl height is a good mention. I remember when I went from my ’90 Legacy to ’06 Mazda3, I felt like I was taxiing a tail dragger, the cowl was so damn high. The Legacy wagon also had visibility akin to an F-16 compared to today’s stupidity. Currently, I have a small sports car that corners at 1g on mid-range HPAS tires, WTF do I need A-pillars so damn thick? Anything I’d do to flip that thing, I deserve what comes. Maybe it’s their test procedure or that I don’t buy tall vehicles that block visibility of the first 20 feet ahead of the “car”, a problem that dwarfs the A-pillar issue, but A-pillars are a definite problem in cities where pedestrians, cyclists, and even perpendicular red-light runners can disappear for long enough to reduce the ability for a good response.
Which brings me to coupes: having been out of them for so long, I had forgotten how less restricting they are to see out of to the sides and slightly back as there’s no massive B-pillar near my ear. The windshield header is annoyingly low for some overhead traffic signals, but I otherwise have better visibility than the last three hatchbacks due to the setback B-pillar. Sure, the C-pillar blindspot is bigger than the D-pillars in the hatches, but proper mirror setup takes care of that and potentially missing something farther back is better than missing it directly alongside.
Here the IIHS is, once again, pointing out a problem that’s long been obvious to everyone else that they were the biggest contributor to causing.
I noticed that first with my Mazda5. As others pointed out, it’s the angle of the pillar, pillar thickness, and how it integrates with the side mirror. I also have a framed, tiny window behind the mirror which lets in light, but doesn’t improve the view.
You know what else helped with the outward visibility of all those old cars? Actually keeping your eyes on the road vs on non-existent screens (IP and phones included).
We keep making the vehicles safer for the passengers, and more dangerous for the pedestrians. (I’m looking at you, brodozers)
This. The fucking arms race of bigger cars that necessitate cars being made bigger to survive getting hit by those behemoths is a joke. There needs to be meaningful caps on vehicle size and weight restrictions based on your license.
Also get rid of the exemption that lets vehicles over 6,000 lbs. be written off for tax purposes.
My wife’s 2023 Forester has much better visibility than the other new vehicles I’ve driven. Other manufacturers seem to cheap out on safety by increasing the amount of metal whereas Subaru is able to maintain the tall greenhouse/low window beltline on the Forester because they’ve invested in better safety engineering.
A Forester is a REVALATION. I can see out! Rearward is awesome too! That generation has real knobs too. ….and a CD player. Last of the great cars. I wont go on about the near land rover AWD system. 9 ” of ground clearance. Soft ride. Class leading safety and resale and ………
Subarus in general are easier to see out of. It makes them a lot nicer places to be in day-to-day driving.
That’s the one good thing I’ll say about them.
2012 generation Outback as well. We cross-shopped a LOT of wagon/SUV things that year, and the Outback was the only one you could actually SEE anything out of.
That is the main thing we loved about our Forester was visibility, the boxer 4 allowing low hood, the boxy profile and somehow not Ferigno-arm-thick A pillars.
Now if they could just fix the CVT, suspension wear, head gaskets, wheel bearings, headlight failures, tail light failures, rapid battery degradation, we might consider them again.
This (on both counts).
A forlorn 2019 Forester that belongs to a family member sits under a magnolia tree for days on end. I drive it every chance I get. The gas mileage isn’t good and it feels cheap inside, but I don’t begrudge it because it turns the world outside into an IMAX screen. The cowl is low, the belt line is low, the windows are expansive. They still make a Vista Cruiser, it just goes by another name now. Visibility lifts the mood.
The extra cost and weight down of the extra glass vs pressed steel of the doors and higher quality steel in the pillars are probably part of the reason people complain about Subarus fuel economy and cheaper interior materials yet praise its sight lines.
I’ll add that, if you’re tall, the trend towards gently-sloping windshields also means lower rooflines, which means that, in some cases, even the sun visors are now low enough to block forward vision. I personally can’t drive the Corolla because the fully closed visor blocks the top 20-30% of my forward vision.
I still love the visibility of a Forester, and VW Golf. I feel they set the bar much better than most.
But lots can still hide, and the older models were better.
I’ve always wondered about this, but than I drive a first-gen Scion xB. I presume the impetus is that sheet metal is cheaper and lighter than glass, so bring the shoulder and hips up, and shrink the windows down. I don’t like it.
They are lighter, but it’s more for side impact protection against taller, heavier vehicles.
Thicker and laid-back A-pillars unquestionably make life more dangerous for pedestrians. I’ve had a couple of scares in my Fiesta ST. Side and rear visibility are okay, though.
My ’07 Suburban has pretty decent visibility all the way around as long as my load doesn’t obstruct the windows; then I have to drive on mirrors.
My wife’s previous 2009 Pontiac G6 could hide an entire vehicle behind its A-pillar at a four-way stop. Her 2024 Kia K5 is a little better but not by much.
Sometimes when I get in my vintage cars it’s startling how much I can see.
My FIL had a 1965 Mercedes 230SL (Pagoda) and even with the hardtop on, it was like wearing nothing at all….nothing at all….nothing at all!
And it was unibody in 1965 with pretty good crash results, seatbelts, and the hardtop could support the weight of the car, despite tiny pillars (more marketing than actual safety, but still)
*grumbles* Stupid sexy FILanders.
One of the best designs ever. A very nice example was used in two films: Arabesque (1966), and Two for the Road (1967).
2000s era GM designs were like early movers when it came to thick A-pillars. I remember one of my parents commenting on them on our 1st-gen VUE, which was otherwise a pretty boxy greenhouse.
After two years of greatly reduced traffic due to the pandemic, a lot of drivers became [more] feral.
“And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed – men like Max.”
Funny, but true—people went nuts during covid and they still haven’t calmed down.
And then add distracted *pedestrians* to the mix. The closest I have ever seen somebody doing an imitation of a bug was a 20-something girl in NYC, eyes firmly on her phone with ear buds in, come THIS CLOSE to stepping off the curb right in front of a coasting NYC bus doing about 30mph. The only thing that saved her was the guy who grabbed her dumb ass and yanked her back.
I have had multiple earbud wearing cyclists (young, I live by the local schools) just randomly cut across my path too. They don’t even glance, just suddenly dart across the road. Brave indeed here in Cryptkeeper-infested God’s Waiting Room, FL where the Ophthalmologists give early-bird specials on cataract surgeries.
And today’s Captain Obvious Award goes to… the IIHS!!!
(Although it is nice to have some numbers that back up the anecdotal evidence)
Sure but if they adjust premiums based on this information then manufacturers would slowly start to break the trend.
I noticed this last weekend. I went from driving my wife’s 2017 Mazda CX-9 which has incredibly thick A-pillars to driving my 1985 Ford LTD which I hadn’t driven in the last 6 months and has fantastic visibility due to the 12(!) windows all around and it felt like someone removed blinders from my eyes.
Also as a tall person with a long torso, this has long been a problem for me in many cars. I remember borrowing a friend’s Chevy HHR a few years ago and when I pulled up to a traffic light the roofline blocked my visibility of the traffic light and I had to duck down to see it.
Chop top hot rodders have long had the issue with viewing stop lights when you are across an intersection from them. So there are these neat little parabolic glass things you put on your dash that you can see upwards somewhat to see the lights without ducking or leaning.
I thought my Leaf had worse visibility than my IS300 (thicker A and C pillars), and now my EV6 is worse. There’s a curved road on my commute that has an oncoming yield turn lane where sometimes they don’t yield, and I have to lean to one side to see the lane, as the A pillars have gotten thicker and more angled.
I guess it’s the price you pay for airbags and crash resistance, but I miss the days of Hondas with thin pillars and lots of visibility.
As someone who used to log tens of thousands of miles per year in rental cars, I have felt this way about newer vehicles for quite some time. Some of them are moderately forgivable, but ones like the gunslits for windows of the Challenger, Mustang, and Camaro are so bad as to almost make the vehicles undriveable. What I really don’t understand are ones like the CR-V or the Santa Cruz – it is almost like they intentionally designed them to be impossible to see out of.
I think it was the 2019 autoshow when I was looking at cheap small SUVs & decided to sit in a new Camaro because I had two 3rd gens back in the day. I thought I was in a tank.
Why aren’t you at your post?
I remember being excited the first time I got a Challenger as a rental. Once I started driving it the excitement turned to loathing because of the poor visibility. Somehow the Camaro is worse, though credit to Ford in making visibility out of the Mustang ever so slightly better than the Dodge.
You can see out of that helmet?
Mostly. Straight out is good, below eye level? Forget it. (501st Legion member)
None of this matters because our government no longer legislates. The IIHS is completely toothless. You’ll die under the hood of a Ford F-10000 and the driver won’t even get a citation.
It is a global market, though. Other countries still have regulations that they actually enforce.
The FTC and NHTSA have been complicit, letting Tesla get away with unsafe tech with extremely, dangerously irresponsible naming (e.g. autopilot and FSD).
If I’m understanding the methodology correctly, since we’re looking at the ground 10 meters out then we’re looking downward. So even vehicles that seem like they have thinner A-pillars could score poorly if they get fatter down where they meet the hood/fender (which as we all know is a pretty bad blind spot in some vehicle- sometimes there’s even a little window up there that’s completely obscured by the interior trim) which is a critical area for small-overlap testing.
Also, (again if I’m understanding correctly), they are were checking against a range of heights, so it’s not a surprise that soaring hood heights would cutoff the view for shorter drivers (it of course reduces visibility for everyone, but I mean specifically at that 10m away point)
I was a bit surprised by the way the A-pillars block visibility in my new Forte GT after coming from a 2013 Soul. It’s a combination of thicker pillars and a steeper windshield rake that brings those pillars closer to me. I’ve gotten used to doing a little “head-bob” to make sure I’m not going to clip a curb when turning left.
It’s the truth, I love my CX-30 but the visibility is really bad, and the 3 hatch was even worse when I looked at them. the A-Pillars are thick, the roofline low, and the beltline for the windows high. Despite the massive size disparity of my former GX470, I could see everything around me out of the Lexus, despite it being a far larger vehicle, Thinner pillars, gigantic greenhouse, and more upright seating position all combined for excellent visibility.
I wanted to love the 3 hatch so much when I was shopping earlier this year, but you really can’t see out of that thing at all.
I also found that somehow the 3 Hatch is more cramped for headroom than my 30 is, despite being a very nearly identical car mechanically. I’m only 6′ so you’d think it wouldn’t be that tight of a squeeze but I really didn’t care for how tight the 3 hatch feels. That’s coming from a 2nd gen 3 hatch my family had several years back which was far more spacious feeling from the drivers seat, also way better visibility.
My 2014 CX-5 gave me some scares with pedestrians who vanished into my A-pillar. The 2023 CX-50 is only slightly better due to my seating position, or perhaps I’m used to moving my head around a bit to see “through” the A-pillar.
They should extend the testing to see what areas around the vehicle can hide a 3 foot tall preschooler from view. They could even have ratings along the lines of “drivers of XXXX vehicle could have a class of 28 preschoolers in front of them, and not see a single one”. I really hope expanding this research really reverses some current vehicle trends.
+1,000. I think if all these moms I sit in carpool with would see an actual graphic of their children lined up in front of their bumper, they would think twice.
Now I have an idea for an activist bumper sticker 🙂
To be clear, I have nothing against SUVs or trucks. They’re tools for a job, but they’ve turned into the wrong tool for the job for soooo many people. Taken to a logical end, it’s like “How many people have to die to appease your need for personal image management?”
I don’t mind seeing a dirty pickup with tools in it. I do mind a clean pickup that is too tall to put anything in the back of it.
Don’t ever get any work done on your house. Owner shows up for a quote in a 2025 brodozer (just learned that word) with the lift and 60″ tires and then when the work needs to get done the ill…er… workers show up in a ’97 civic with lumber sticking out of the window.
I’ve thought an in person demo at preschool pickup might drive home the point, have someone in their jacked up lifestyle truck sit in the driver’s seat, close their eyes, and have the entire school of kids stand in a group in front of it. Then have them open their eyes and ask them how many kids they can see from the driver’s seat. And see if it scares the shit out of them when 20+ invisible kids start wandering off.
I think you would be disappointed in the selfishness of some of the brodozer owners
True, that applies a lot these days in general
My 2013 Audi TT could hide two lanes of brodozers behind its driver’s side rearview mirror, A pillar, and high belt line. I was constantly being surprised by cross traffic, even after looking left-right-left before inching out.
The situation is much improved in my 2017 Infiniti Q60.
But – oh! – the revelation and joy of the panoramic vistas available to me from my new-to-me 2002 Honda CR-V!!
I love not being able to see my own hood. It’s a weird thing to talk about, but whenever I switch to a truck/SUV, it’s almost appalling.
However, my main ride (2015 Odyssey) has notorious thick A-pillars, and the even more massive B-pillar blocks a significant part of my peripheral vision in my seating position with long legs.
The A-pillar is especially noticeable because of the parallel effect — that is, I’m attempting a right turn, and there’s also a small car or pedestrian moving across my field of vision from left to right. In some situations, the A-pillar blocks the object completely depending on my rate of turn and their speed. I’ve had to develop a new trick that I call the “OH NO YOU DIDN’T!” where I move my head from side-to-side like a hungry baby bird.
A pillars FTW. Sunday’s autocross, the starter would show with his hands how far away I was from the start line & by the time I got close I couldn’t see his hands anymore behind the A pillar. I warned him the first run, he consciously moved over each time I lined up. (GR C for reference, which I’ve driven worse.)
You, sir, get image of the day for that header. Brilliant!